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ptorrone writes "It was just a matter of time until the Segway technology would be used as a robotics platform. University of Southern California Robotics Lab's Segway RMP (Robotic Mobility Platform) has a lot of great information if you're looking to convert a Segway to a robot. On the site there are videos as well as instruction on how to build your own." Update: 07/13 21:30 GMT by T : Dr. Andrew Howard writes with an important clarification about the project: "This is *not* a standard Segway HT that we have converted to robotics applications. Rather, this is a customized, limited production unit that has been specially modified by the manufacturer. The web-site does *not* show how to convert an existing Segway HT into a robotic platform."

MCassatt asks: "It's a truism in many fields that breakthroughs come from the edge: the scandalous Impressionists become pretty pictures for posters and umbrellas; the world of science fiction becomes the world of science. The wonderful, the fantastic, and the mad of today are tomorrow's mainstream. Are there examples of this in computer science? Not extreme programming, but extreme programs?"

adamba writes: "Why are manhole covers round?" "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" "How would you design a remote control for venetian blinds?" "What company is famous for interview questions like those?" You might not know the answer to the first three questions, but you probably know the last one. The notion of asking "Microsoft interview questions," quick logic puzzles and brainteasers, has become accepted wisdom for many technology companies. In comparison, the questions asked during traditional interviews, such as "Describe your typical day" and "What is your greatest weakness?" seem too simplistic, too easy to handle with a prepared answer, too prone to allowing weak candidates to slip through: they simply don't reveal enough about the person. While the Microsoft questions appear to be a better way to evaluate people, the issue has never really been seriously examined. Microsoft's success would seem to make the argument pointless: Can $250 billion in market capitalization be wrong?" Read on for an interesting look at the details and justifications for this kind of interview. How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle author William Poundstone pages 288 publisher Little Brown & Company rating 9 reviewer Adam Barr ISBN 0316919160 summary The scoop on Microsoft interviews--with answers!

Now comes a new book, How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers by science writer William Poundstone. Poundstone talked to various people who have been involved in Microsoft hiring, including those who were interviewed, and those who gave interviews (full disclosure: I worked at Microsoft for ten years and was one of the people he talked to). He includes a lengthy list of questions, and most interestingly for many people, he also includes answers.

In the book, Poundstone traces the origins of this type of question, providing some fascinating information on the history of intelligence testing. He then chronicles how a certain type of puzzle interview caught on in the high-tech industry. Microsoft was not the first company to ask such questions, but it certainly popularized it.

Poundstone explains that responding to a problem you can't solve could be thought of as the fundamental problem in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and then continues,

"The problems used in AI research have often been puzzles or games. These are simpler and more clearly defined than the complex problems of the real world. They too involve the elements of logic, insight, and intuition that pertain to real problems. Many of the people at Microsoft follow AI work closely, of course, and this may help to explain what must strike some readers as peculiar--their supreme confidence that silly little puzzles have a bearing on the real world."

It could be--or maybe Microsoft employees assume that since they were hired that way, it's a great way to hire (and complaints from those who were not hired are just sour grapes). Most developers I knew thought of AI as a pretty academic discipline, and were more concerned with putting a dialog box up at the right location on the screen than trying to pass the Turing Test.

Nevertheless, as companies seek to emulate Microsoft, the questions have caught on elsewhere. And as Poundstone put it, such questions have now "metastasized" to other industries, such as finance.

This makes the effectiveness of these questions an important issue. Poundstone first presents evidence that "Where do you see yourself in five years" and "What are you most proud of" are fairly pointless questions. In one experiment he describes, two trained interviewers conducted interviews with a group of volunteers. Their evaluations were compared to those of another group who saw a fifteen second video of the interview: the candidate entering the room, shaking hands, and sitting down. The opinions correlated strongly; in other words, when you are sitting in an interview telling the interviewer what you do on your day off and what the last book you read was, the interviewer has already made up his or her mind, based on who knows what subjective criteria. As Poundstone laments, "This would be funny if it weren't tragic."

Puzzle interviews could hardly be worse than that, but it turns out the evidence that they are better is doubtful. Poundstone shows how intelligence tests are on very dubious scientific standing, and points out that Microsoft's interviews are a form of IQ test, even though Microsoft does not admit that publicly. In his 1972 book of puzzles Games for the Superintelligent, Mensa member James Fixx wrote, "If you don't particularly enjoy the kinds of puzzles and problems we're talking about here, that fact alone says nothing about your intelligence in general". Yet virtually every Microsoft employee accepts the "obvious" rationale, that only people who do well in logic puzzles will do well at Microsoft.

There is another important point about puzzle-based interviews: although you would think that they were naturally more objective than traditional interviews--more black or white, right or wrong, and therefore less subject to interpretation by the interviewer--in fact, interviewers' evaluation of answers can be extremely subjective. Once you have formed your impression of a candidate from the enter/handshake/sit-down routine at the start of the interview, it is easy to rationalize a candidate's performance in an interview, either positively or negatively. They needed a bunch of hints to get the answer? Sure, but they were just small hints and it's a tough problem. They got the correct answer right away? No fair, they must have seen it before.

Given the ease with which the answers to logic puzzles can be spun, it is highly probable that Microsoft interviewers are also making fifteen-second judgements of candidates, without even realizing it.

Three years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about job interviews called The New-Boy Network. Gladwell quotes much of the same research as Poundstone, and relates the story of Nolan Myers, a Harvard senior who is being recruited by Tellme and Microsoft. He has done a one-hour interview with Hadi Partovi of Tellme, and spoken to Gladwell, the author, in a coffee shop for about ninety minutes. His initial interaction with Microsoft was much briefer: he asked Steve Ballmer a question during an on-campus event, which led to an exchange of emails.

As Gladwell writes, "What convinced Ballmer he wanted Myers? A glimpse! He caught a little slice of Nolan Myers in action and--just like that--the C.E.O. of a four-hundred-billion-dollar company was calling a college senior in his dorm room. Ballmer somehow knew he liked Myers, the same way Hadi Partovi knew, and the same way I knew after our little chat at Au Bon Pain."

So Steve Ballmer, who obviously does not feel that he is choosing people based on traditional interviewing techniques, and in fact was one of the originators of the "Microsoft questions," is more prone to making fifteen-second judgements than he would probably admit.

The flaw, if any, may simply be in ascribing too much value to the puzzles themselves. The actual questions may be secondary: the company might do as well asking geek-centric trivia questions, like "What was the name of Lord Byron's niece?" That does not mean Microsoft is hiring the same people that an investment bank is going to hire. The cues they look for may be different: instead of a firm handshake and the right tie, they may be looking for intelligent eyes and fast speech, or whatever non-verbal cues ubergeeks throw off.

A Microsoft interview candidate will typically talk to four or five employees, and in general must get a "hire" recommendation from all of them. Even if the employees are actually basing their recommendations not on puzzle-solving ability but on a subconscious evaluation, it is unlikely that all of them will be subconsciously using the same criteria. Emitting the proper signals to satisfy four different Microsoft employees may be as good a judge of a candidate as any, and Microsoft may be good at interviewing simply because it tends to hire people that are similar in some unknown way to the current group of employees. If another company adopts puzzle interviews, they may discover that they are not hiring the smartest people, just the people most like themselves.

In the end, the best thing that can be said about puzzle interviews is that as a screening technique, they are no worse than traditional interviews. And there are some side effects: some candidates may be more prone to accept a job with Microsoft because of the interview style, and imparted wisdom about the technique may function as a useful pre-screening of prospective applicants. And of course, employees may get a kick out of showing a candidate how smart they are, although this can have a downside: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? has several examples of interviewers who seemed more concerned with proving their intelligence than in gauging that of the candidate. One former Microsoftie admits they asked candidates a question they did not know the answer to, just to see what they would do.

Two chapters of the book, entitled "Embracing Cluelessness" and "How to Outsmart the Puzzle Interview," attempt to help interview candidates who are confronted with such puzzle questions. The official advice is scarce: Microsoft's Interview Tips page advises candidates "Be prepared to think," which isn't much help, since presumably nobody is advising the opposite. Some of the recruiters who go to college campuses have their own little tips; for example, one recruiter named Colleen offers a quote from Yoda: "Do or do not, there is no try." Other recruiter tips include "Stay awake" and "Always leave room for dessert." Luckily, Poundstone gives advice that is a bit more concrete than that.

Microsoft puzzles can be divided into two types: those where the methodology is more important than the answer, and those where only the answer matters.

The "methodology" puzzles break into two classes, "design" puzzles ("How would you design a particular product or service?") and "estimation" puzzles ("How much of a certain object occupies a certain space?"--for example, "How much does the ice in a hockey rink weigh?")

Design questions exist because at Microsoft, responsibility for product development is split between two groups, the developers and the program managers. Developers write code: program managers design the user interface, trying to balance the needs of users with the technical constraints from developers. As Poundstone points out, while estimation questions and general logic puzzles are universal, the design questions are reserved for program managers.

The reason is that program management does not require the specific skills of development. Designing software is something any reasonably intelligent person can attempt, so the design questions are aimed at finding people who are really good at design. In fact one program manager I worked with told me that the best way to distinguish a potential program manager from a potential developer was to ask them to design a house: a developer would jump right in, while a program manager would step back and ask questions about the constraints on the house.

(Developers, meanwhile, are usually asked to write code on the whiteboard, an experience that program management candidates are spared. Books exist that discuss coding problems in more detail, such as Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job by John Mongan and Noah Suojanen, which covers many standard programming questions and even includes answers to a few of the logic puzzles that Poundstone addresses).

Poundstone does include some of these design questions and provides sample answers. But the "answer" to these questions is really the process involved: ask questions, state assumptions, propose design. That's all you need to know about them. If you are wondering why Microsoft did not use this logical procedure when confronted with the question "Design a response to the open source movement," but instead seems to have spouted off the first five things that popped into its collective head--that's just more proof that performance in interviews is not necessarily a great indicator of future job performance.

Another recruiter, Stacey, gives the following interview tip: "The best interview tips I can give you are to relax and think for yourself. For a Microsoft interview, be prepared to answer both technical and problem solving questions. Ask clarifying questions and remember to think out loud. We are more interested in the way your are thinking through a problem then we are in your final answer!"

That approach works for the "methodology" questions: design and estimation. What about the other kinds--the more traditional brainteasers? For those questions, forget your methodology. What Microsoft interviewers want is the right answer.

James Fixx, writing three years before Microsoft was founded, offers some advice that may hearten potential Microsoft recruits: "One way to improve one's ability to use one's mind is simply to see how very bright people use theirs." With that in mind, we can follow along with Poundstone as he explains the solutions to the puzzles that the very bright people at Microsoft ask during interviews. He certainly delivers the goods: 100 pages of answers. Unfortunately, it's not clear whether seeing those answers help you tune up your brain to answer problems that do not appear in the book.

In his book, Fixx spends some time trying to explain what, as he so delicately puts it, "the superintelligent do that's different from what ordinary people do." For example, trying to describe how a superintelligent person figures out the next letter in the sequence "O T T F F S S", he advises people to think hard: "Persistence alone will now bring its reward, and eventually a thought occurs to him." Talking about how to arrange four pennies so there are two straight lines with three pennies in each line, he writes "The true puzzler...gropes for some loophole, and, with luck, quickly finds it in the third dimension." Further hints abound: "The intelligent person tries... not to impose unnecessary restrictions on his mind. The bright person has succeeded because he does not assume the problem cannot be solved simply because it cannot be solved in one way or even two ways he has tried." This advice sounds great in theory, but how do you apply it in practice? How do you make your mind think that way? As Poundstone quotes Louis Armstrong, "Man, if you have to ask 'What is it?' you ain't never goin' to know."

Poundstone recognizes that the flashes of insight that Fixx describes, and that Microsoft interviewers expect, are more of a hit-or-miss thing than the inevitable result of hard thinking by an intelligent person: "What is particularly troubling is how little 'logic' seems to be involved in some phases of problem solving. Difficult problems are often solved via a sudden, intuitive insight. One moment you're stuck; the next moment this insight has popped into your head, though not by any step-by-step logic that can be recounted."

During interview training I participated in when I worked there, Microsoft would emphasize four attributes that it was looking for when hiring: intelligence, hard work, ability to get things done, and vision. Intelligence was always #1, yet despite this, Poundstone says that the official Microsoft people he talked to would shy away from the word "intelligence", preferring to use terms like "bandwidth" and "inventiveness". Indeed Microsoft's Interview Tips web page says "We look for original, creative thinkers, and our interview process is designed to find those people." No mention of the word intelligence or any notion that interviews are some sort of intelligence test.

In fact, although I think that most Microsoft people would consider the puzzle tests to be mainly a test of intelligence, they may do better at testing some of the other desired attributes. Psychologist and personnel researcher Harry Hepner once said, "Creative thinkers make many false starts, and continually waver between unmanageable fantasies and systematic attack." Poundstone explains that you have to figure out when your fantasies have become too unmanageable: "To deal effectively with puzzles (and with the bigger problems for which they may be a model), you must operate on two or more levels simultaneously. One thread of consciousness tackles the problem while another, higher-level thread monitors the progress. You need to keep asking yourself 'Is this approach working? How much time have I spent on this approach, and how likely is it to produce an answer soon? Is there something else I should be trying?'"

This is great advice, not just for a puzzle, but for a job, and life in general. So watching someone think through a puzzle might be a great way to see how they would tackle a tough problem at work--the "hard work" and "get things done" abilities that Microsoft is also looking for. As James Fixx writes in the sequel More Games for the Superintelligent, "While the less intelligent person, unsure of ever being able to solve a problem at all, is easily discouraged, the intelligent person is fairly sure of succeeding and therefore presses on, discouragements be damned."

Unfortunately, the typical Microsoft interviewer is not looking at the approach to puzzle questions as a test of perseverence. Someone who tries five different attempts might demonstrate more resourcefulness than someone who just "gets it"--but they would get turned down. Interviewers who ask puzzle questions are probing the "intelligence" category, and they want the right answer.

The last chapter of the book is titled "How Innovative Companies Ought to Interview" and deals with a soon-to-be-problem: How will the industry be affected by the publication of this book? Will interviews still work if everyone knows the secrets?

Knowledge of Microsoft-style questions is already out there on the Internet. Since the candidates who participate in the interviews do not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, they are free to tell others the questions they were asked, and from these reports databases of questions have been built up. Poundstone includes the URLs of several sites, including Kiran Bondalapati's "Interview Question Bank", Michael Pryor's "Techinterview", Chris Sells' "Interviewing at Microsoft", and William Wu's "Riddles". These sites generally don't include answers, but certainly knowing the types of questions to expect can be an advantage.

Microsoft employees are aware of such sites. Once, when I sent email describing the questions I had asked a Microsoft candidate, I got a nasty reply from someone else at the company: Didn't I know that the question I had asked was posted on a website of known Microsoft interview questions? On the other hand, with no official internal Microsoft list of questions, some employees are undoubtedly using these sites to come up with material. Even within Microsoft there is debate about which questions are reasonable. In an unscientific survey I took of former Microsoft program managers, opinion was divided on the validity of some of the questions. A question described by one person as a good test of a candidate's ability was dismissed by another as foolish.

Poundstone does point out that some questions are silly and should not be asked ("Define the color green"), but he gives serious answers to others which I don't think are worthwhile either, including "If you could remove any of the fifty U.S. states, which would it be?" and "How do they make M&Ms?" Furthermore, I would argue that if an entire class of questions can be "tainted" by How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, they don't deserve to be asked in the first place. Estimation questions might be invalidated by the revelation that the way to solve them was to multiply together a bunch of wild guesses. The strategy of using a design question to to differentiate program management candidates from developer candidates might also go the way of the dodo. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

How Would You Move Mount Fuji? is worth reading even if you don't plan on interviewing at Microsoft. It has some interesting history, a few good Microsoft tidbits, and puzzles that are entertaining on their own. For those considering a job at Microsoft, the book may ratchet up the "arms race" of questions. Microsoft employees may assume that people interviewing have read the book--so if you are going to interview there, or anywhere else that imitates their style, you should probably read it too.

You can purchase How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

jukal writes: "copy-paste from a Wired article: 'Students at the University of Southern California could face a school year without computer access if they are busted swapping movies and music online. In an e-mail message to all students, school officials warned that using peer-to-peer file-trading services could force the university to kick students off the network. '"

aarondsouza writes: "The NY Times (registration required, mumble... mutter...) has this story on two different directions being taken in the supercomputing community. The Los Alamos labs have a couple of new toys. One built for raw numbercrunching speed, and the other for efficiency. The article has interesting numbers on the performance/price (price in the power consumption and maintenance sense) ratios for the two machines. As an aside... 'Deep Blue', 'Green Blade' ... wonder what Google Sets would think of that..."

oily_ants writes "I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites. That's why I like slashdot so much. Good (??) summaries of all of the stuff out there on the net. Now there is a project at Columbia University by the nlp group that attempts to generate computer summaries of all of those news articles on different web sites. The project is called Newsblaster and the summaries are excellent. You can read about the project on regular news sites like Online Journalism Review or USA Today."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Online Journalism Review has a thoughtful piece that looks at the intersection of mass media, democracy, and technology. The Independent Media Centers are the nodes where this all happens. It's interesting that this article is written from the point of view of the journalism profession. I wonder what bloggers would say? Or the social activists who are making the news thanks to this and similar new media. See Modern Day Muckrakers: The Rise of the Independent Media Center Movement."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Online Journalism Review has a thoughtful piece that looks at the intersection of mass media, democracy, and technology. The Independent Media Centers are the nodes where this all happens. It's interesting that this article is written from the point of view of the journalism profession. I wonder what bloggers would say? Or the social activists who are making the news thanks to this and similar new media. See Modern Day Muckrakers: The Rise of the Independent Media Center Movement."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Online Journalism Review has a thoughtful piece that looks at the intersection of mass media, democracy, and technology. The Independent Media Centers are the nodes where this all happens. It's interesting that this article is written from the point of view of the journalism profession. I wonder what bloggers would say? Or the social activists who are making the news thanks to this and similar new media. See Modern Day Muckrakers: The Rise of the Independent Media Center Movement."

RazzleDazzle writes: "There is a free and open debate between Jack Valenti of the MPAA vs Larry Lessig of Stanford Law about the DMCA. Following the disappointing loss of the Felton case this might be a good place to spread literature and show support for freedom if you can make it. ... This evening at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. For info on the live webcast click here. 2600 has more information."

HarrisonSilp writes "CNN.com has a story regarding the U.S. Military's recent foray into using Virtual Reality as a training method. Being developed by Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), they call it Mission Rehearsal Exercise or MRE for short, and it is a most impressive setup. 'The 5-minute scenario is projected onto a 150-degree movie screen, complete with 10.2-channel audio that creates floor-shaking sound effects. To enhance the sense of reality, smells including burned charcoal can be pumped into the room.' It almost makes me want to write off college and join the army..."

winter@ES writes: "The U.S. Army is teaming up with Sony, Pandemic Studios, and Quicksilver software to develop a pair of squad-level combat games. Through the Institute for Creative Technologies (jointly operated by the U.S. Army and the University of SOCAL) the Army will be funding and developing "C-Force", targetted for next-gen consoles, and "CS-12" for PCs. The project is headed up by Mech Warrior veteran, Rob Sears."

tulare writes: "According to this story at Wired, a research team is developing a way to replace the steel core inside high-capacity electrical power transmission lines with a fiberoptic core, which apparantly could provide a dual benefit: a 200% increase in emergency transmission capacity along with the ability to "carry several gigabits of data per second." (Per line?) There are a few kinks to work out - like how to splice the data in and out of the lines, but the story talks about an initial rollout date in 2003. Not soon enough to bail Californians out of the current crunch, but considering the benefits (less line sag, greater capacity without building new towers/routes), the effort certainly seems worthwhile." There's some more info from the researchers at this site as well.

Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"

Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"

josh fouts writes "What's the problem with the MPAA lawsuit against 2600? The problem is this: providing access to information is not a crime, and is in fact a cornerstone of American democracy. Ben Berkowitz has a column on onlinejournalism.com analyzing the significance of this lawsuit. "

Clan Hanna asks: "With the newest processors that AMD and Intel have released, running at 1.0 gigahertz, chip designers may soon have a new problem on their hands more than can simply be solved by placing a bigger heatsync on the motherboard. Microwave frequencies run from 1 gigahertz to 1 terahertz. Currently processors heat up because they emit infrared radiation, but what is going to happen when they start to emit -microwave- radiation? I'm sure chip designers think about this in the back of their minds, but I'm just wondering if they have considered any real world solutions. If so, I'd love to find out about them."

Several friends turned us on to this article at the Online Journalism Review [OJR] that says the combination of AOL and Time-Warner may lead to an information monopoly more dangerous than Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly. The article focuses on political power, but I believe another big danger of the AOL/Time-Warner merger is that it will stifle development of innovative, non-mainstream Web sites. (continued)

A quote from the OJR article: "Never in the history of news publishing has one company held such extensive power over what we see and hear as does AOL in the wake of the Time-Warner deal."

Have you looked at AOL's main page lately? I don't mean the one at aol.com, but the one AOL members see when they log on. If you're a Linux user, the answer is obviously "no" unless you borrow a friend's computer (and AOL account), because AOL doesn't allow Linux folks to access their system. Like blind people, we're pariahs in AOL-land. Remember that AOL boasts about their "exclusive content" constantly; I saw yet another TV commercial last night that told me this. Like it or not, AOL has become as vital a part of modern American culture as Judge Judy, and it might be nice to check in now and then to see what kind of online experience AOL's (claimed) 22 million users are getting. It's sad that I can't do this unless I choose to use a proprietary operating system, which I don't.

But I'm far more worried about the Time-Warner side of the business than I am about AOL's willingness to exclude Linux users, handicapped people, and others who don't fit into their mass-market mold. Talk about a machine to influence public opinion! Movies, books, CNN, music, a bunch of influential magazines, cable TV systems all over the country! In his day, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was considered by many to be more powerful than the U.S. president, and he didn't have a fraction of the information control Time-Warner has now.

It's easy to forget that Slashdot is a niche Web site with comparatively few readers by AOL/Time-Warner standards. Wired, Salon, Slate, and CNN.com all claim more readers than Slashdot. So do The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USAToday, and every single one of Time-Warner's magazines. More people are interested in celebrity gossip (People magazine's stock in trade) than in news about Open Source Software and ever-faster microprocessors. Time covers events that are interesting to more people than new game releases for Linux. An interview with someone like Leon Lederman or Steve Wozniak may be hot stuff to you and me, but the overwhelming majority of the world's population would rather read about Bill Clinton or Leonardo DiCaprio. Indeed, I doubt that a statistically significant percentage of Americans -- let alone citizens of other countries -- have even heard of most of the people we mention on Slashdot. And this is why Slashdot would never have grown and prospered under Time-Warner's thumb.

The section of Time-Warner's online empire for which I used to write was Netly News, the company's attempt to put out a WWW publication aimed at "hip" Internet users instead of at the general public. It got about 100,000 steady readers, which was not bad back in the "old" 'net-days of 1996 and 1997. But 100,000 readers was a tiny number in Time-Warner's eyes. Josh Quittner and Noah Robischon, who ran Netly News back then, never could get Time's marketing and ad sales people interested in promoting their little publication because Time's business people were used to readerships measured in round millions, not in thousands or hundreds of thousands. So Time decided Netly was a failure and let it die a quiet death in early 1998, not out of ideological concerns but because it simply wasn't popular enough to meet their "success" criteria.

My personal fear of giant corporate voices controlling the Internet as a news medium is based not only on their potential political influence, but also on their ability to stifle innovation online. Do you think Rob Malda and Jeff Bates would ever have been allowed to do their schtick on AOL or through Time-Warner? Would Time-Warner have tolerated -- let alone supported -- freshmeat? What about other sites that cover Linux and Open Source news, like Linux Today, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, and all the rest? What about even smaller, more "niche" sites like osOpinion, Technocrat.net, and 32bitsonline.com?

All of these sites, put together, don't attract enough readers to get a Time ad salesperson interested in actively marketing them. In Time's world, ad campaigns start at the $100,000 level and go up from there, and it really takes $1 million or more to get Time's corporate ears to perk up in any significant way. Web publishing, on the AOL/Time-Warner level, is like music or movies; they are interested in producing big hits and only big hits, and anything they don't feel they can make into a million-seller is going to be ignored.

It is true that AOL and Time-Warner will probably never be able to control the Web's content as tightly as Microsoft controls the desktop operating system market. But by making "their" information easier to find and access than information "they" don't control, and adding in the cross-promotion potential available to a company that has interests in everything from movie production to chat servers, within the next few years we could easily see a world where 95% of all Web users only access 5% of everything that's potentially available online. And if that 5% is controlled by a single giant, mass-market media conglomerate -- or even by two or three like-thinking, mass-market conglomerates -- the next generation of bright youngsters who have innovative Web site ideas will never get a chance to build a Slashdot-style following, no matter what operating system they use.

Several friends turned us on to this article at the Online Journalism Review [OJR] that says the combination of AOL and Time-Warner may lead to an information monopoly more dangerous than Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly. The article focuses on political power, but I believe another big danger of the AOL/Time-Warner merger is that it will stifle development of innovative, non-mainstream Web sites. (continued)

A quote from the OJR article: "Never in the history of news publishing has one company held such extensive power over what we see and hear as does AOL in the wake of the Time-Warner deal."

Have you looked at AOL's main page lately? I don't mean the one at aol.com, but the one AOL members see when they log on. If you're a Linux user, the answer is obviously "no" unless you borrow a friend's computer (and AOL account), because AOL doesn't allow Linux folks to access their system. Like blind people, we're pariahs in AOL-land. Remember that AOL boasts about their "exclusive content" constantly; I saw yet another TV commercial last night that told me this. Like it or not, AOL has become as vital a part of modern American culture as Judge Judy, and it might be nice to check in now and then to see what kind of online experience AOL's (claimed) 22 million users are getting. It's sad that I can't do this unless I choose to use a proprietary operating system, which I don't.

But I'm far more worried about the Time-Warner side of the business than I am about AOL's willingness to exclude Linux users, handicapped people, and others who don't fit into their mass-market mold. Talk about a machine to influence public opinion! Movies, books, CNN, music, a bunch of influential magazines, cable TV systems all over the country! In his day, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was considered by many to be more powerful than the U.S. president, and he didn't have a fraction of the information control Time-Warner has now.

It's easy to forget that Slashdot is a niche Web site with comparatively few readers by AOL/Time-Warner standards. Wired, Salon, Slate, and CNN.com all claim more readers than Slashdot. So do The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USAToday, and every single one of Time-Warner's magazines. More people are interested in celebrity gossip (People magazine's stock in trade) than in news about Open Source Software and ever-faster microprocessors. Time covers events that are interesting to more people than new game releases for Linux. An interview with someone like Leon Lederman or Steve Wozniak may be hot stuff to you and me, but the overwhelming majority of the world's population would rather read about Bill Clinton or Leonardo DiCaprio. Indeed, I doubt that a statistically significant percentage of Americans -- let alone citizens of other countries -- have even heard of most of the people we mention on Slashdot. And this is why Slashdot would never have grown and prospered under Time-Warner's thumb.

The section of Time-Warner's online empire for which I used to write was Netly News, the company's attempt to put out a WWW publication aimed at "hip" Internet users instead of at the general public. It got about 100,000 steady readers, which was not bad back in the "old" 'net-days of 1996 and 1997. But 100,000 readers was a tiny number in Time-Warner's eyes. Josh Quittner and Noah Robischon, who ran Netly News back then, never could get Time's marketing and ad sales people interested in promoting their little publication because Time's business people were used to readerships measured in round millions, not in thousands or hundreds of thousands. So Time decided Netly was a failure and let it die a quiet death in early 1998, not out of ideological concerns but because it simply wasn't popular enough to meet their "success" criteria.

My personal fear of giant corporate voices controlling the Internet as a news medium is based not only on their potential political influence, but also on their ability to stifle innovation online. Do you think Rob Malda and Jeff Bates would ever have been allowed to do their schtick on AOL or through Time-Warner? Would Time-Warner have tolerated -- let alone supported -- freshmeat? What about other sites that cover Linux and Open Source news, like Linux Today, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, and all the rest? What about even smaller, more "niche" sites like osOpinion, Technocrat.net, and 32bitsonline.com?

All of these sites, put together, don't attract enough readers to get a Time ad salesperson interested in actively marketing them. In Time's world, ad campaigns start at the $100,000 level and go up from there, and it really takes $1 million or more to get Time's corporate ears to perk up in any significant way. Web publishing, on the AOL/Time-Warner level, is like music or movies; they are interested in producing big hits and only big hits, and anything they don't feel they can make into a million-seller is going to be ignored.

It is true that AOL and Time-Warner will probably never be able to control the Web's content as tightly as Microsoft controls the desktop operating system market. But by making "their" information easier to find and access than information "they" don't control, and adding in the cross-promotion potential available to a company that has interests in everything from movie production to chat servers, within the next few years we could easily see a world where 95% of all Web users only access 5% of everything that's potentially available online. And if that 5% is controlled by a single giant, mass-market media conglomerate -- or even by two or three like-thinking, mass-market conglomerates -- the next generation of bright youngsters who have innovative Web site ideas will never get a chance to build a Slashdot-style following, no matter what operating system they use.

Occasionally someone submits a feature that really raises my eyebrow. Jack William Bell did just that by submitting 'Open Source as an Ant Farm'. Its a really interesting piece that talks about code as art, and much more. Its quite funny, and its got a lot to think about. Click now, you won't regret it. Open Source as an Ant Farm by Jack William Bell

Where Open Source is concerned, hyperbole from the digerteratti hype meisters proliferates nearly as quickly as the hyperlinks they hype. Let's face it -- Clapton has been deposed; Linus Torvalds is now God. And those pundits shouting his divinity the loudest can^Òt even tell a stack register from a walrus. I wonder if Jesus had the same problem?

This constant lionizing of Linus is getting on my nerves. I mean, he is probably a great guy and all (if you know what I mean), but a great man? Usually you wait until people are safely dead (and unable to further embarrass themselves) before heaping those kinds of laurels on their heads. If I was he I would start worrying about that strange human proclivity for taking our living idols down a notch once in a while. Or even nailing them to a tree. Not to mention burning at the stake, drawing and quartering and satirizin g on TV.

But I knew things were getting ridiculous this last week when I saw three different weblogs pointing to the same dumb article using variations on the same dumb caption: 'Open Source as an Art Form' . I mean come on, just because a bunch of nutzoid art types gives Torvalds an award for Linux doesn't mean that an operating system or a development model is art! Yeesh!

Not that I don't think of programming as art mind you. After all I am a programmer myself and I often like to compare what I do to the creation of art. A kind of raw industrial art perpetuated underneath the digital world by Morlo cks like myself while the Eloi cavort on the surface, unaware of the immense complexity (and fragility) of their world. In other words code is art, but it is exclusionist art. No more approachable to the everyday person than a Jackson Pollock work. And twice as incomprehensible!

After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art. Not something alive and thriving. Bubbling and fermenting and making funny smells the way the process of hacking out good code does.

But, you say, it is being appreciated just as you would like! After all, isn't that what the award was all about?

Well, no frankly. Not even close. In my opinion if you can't write good code you can't appreciate good code. At the most you can only appreciate the end result, the compiled program. And, while some programs are definitely 'art' in their own right, many others cannot be described as such based on their even visible-to-the-user external features. And Linux, while a work of art in my programmer eyes, is really just a kernel. A piece of code that, if everything is working right, the user will never see directly. Some of my peers would agree with this. Some will not. As always opinions are all over the map...

One poster on Slashdot tried to have it both ways when he opined "Which part of the programming is the art? Is it the code, neatly formatted, with creative comments and clever algorithms or is it the finished product? When you look at 'art' in a museum, all you see is the finished product . . . So which is the art? The code or the program? I personally think it's the program, and beautiful programs usually have very nice/efficient/clean code."

While another lamented "When the New Yorker compares Open Source to the Algonquin roundtable, the seventh seal will be complete and Microsoft will be free to release Windows 2000."

And another asks "So how is this art going to be displayed? Will art galleries have framed printouts of C code, or will they just give out Linux CDs?"

How indeed? Well, if you read the dumb article I mentioned above you will find the author's thesis is that neither the source code nor the compiled Linux kernel code is the issue, rather the art in question is the Open Source development model that built it! He bases this proposition the following facts:

• China Youth Daily used the Microsoft consternation over Open Source for propaganda purposes.
• The Open Source development model (as described by Eric Raymond) is about cooperation and participation.
• Indian Potlatches were about cooperation and participation.
• The Surrealists did some stuff that involved cooperation and participation.
• A lot of twentieth century art uses 'quotation' (like painting soup cans or sampling 1970's Rock and Roll for Rap music) and 'quotation' is kind of like Open Source, isn't it?
• John Myatt's art forgery scam was kind of like 'quotation' too! And it was kind of like art as well
• When some people share a pseudonym to do wacky performance art, and then someone else uses the same nom de plume to crack a web site or to write an on-line 'tag-team' novel you have cooperation and participation and quotation and propaganda all rolled into one, with an Internet connection as a sweetener!

My first thought on reading the article was "Huh?" Then I reread and listed the salient points above and reiterated "Huh?"

Clearly Harvey Blume isn't a programmer. If he was I wouldn't trust him to code a 'for' loop based on his demonstrated grasp of simple logic. Nonetheless if he had simply stated that Open Source programming with the Bazaar model is 'Art' because he says it was art I would have much less to quibble with. After all art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Only he didn't. Instead he chose to defend his allegation using arguments that indicate he doesn't understand anything about the subject. In other words, I cannot say Mr. Blume is wrong, but I can state with near certainty that he is the wrong person to make the claim. He might be right, but for the wrong reasons.

So, assuming you can call a development model an art form -- how do you hang it on the wall? I would argue that it is already there. The main point about Open Source is that it is (wait for it) . . . OPEN! Duh^Å Unlike 'Closed' development the source code is available for all to see. And often the discussions between developers are available as well, archived on one list server or another. In the Internet sense you can't get up against the wall any more that that!

But what does the average art lover see hanging there? Open Source as an Art Form? I think not. More like Open Source as an Ant Farm! At most they will get a glimpse of we scurrying workers as we toil underground. But they will never, ever understand. As I said before, I am OK with that.

Non programmer types can present art awards for Linux or even Sendmail if they like, but it doesn't signify to me. In my opinion these awards mean nothing until they are given by someone who understands why the jargon file definition of 'Recursion' is funny. Until then I would rather they just threw money. Wouldn't you?

Joshua Fouts writes "Interesting story on the future of Tablet Technology on OJR.org by Roger Fidler, author of "Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media." Fiddler explores whether new products, such as the e-book and the Webpad, will supplant newspapers and other print publications. It's called The Pulse of Tablet Technology "

Binder writes "A project to design a cpu and release the spec under some free license. They say it should be as fast or faster the a Merced, will have a NUMA architecture, and should cost about $100 (US)."

Leif Hardison wrote in to say that hardware.doa.org is is sponsoring a contest for the most inovative case designs. Peter Renshaw wrote in to tell us about the ICQ GNU Project which aims (surprise!) to produce an open source ICQ proggie. Mike Rust wrote in to tell us that SNES9x 1.0 for DOS been released. It supports transparency and SuperFX emulation and all kinds of neat stuff. Linux Port should be Coming. Joshua Fouts wrote in to plug The Online Journal is following the proceedings involving Kevin Mitnick's trial in detail. They also have an article about Chris Lamprecht. Both are pretty interesting. Lastly Michael Dillon sent us a link to an interesting article on 4 phases of Linux acceptance.

DJ Ierardi writes "I don't recall seeing this posted here: Ralph Nader encourages Michael Dell to pre-install Linux" here is the link. Sure, it won't happen, but it's still interesting.

Clyde Jones wrote in to say "Rockwell Semiconductor is coming out with a new modem that is up to 12 times faster than 56K. It would rival cable modem tecnology. Here is the URL."